SGER: Regional Climate Modeling Coordination for the United States

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

The need for regional modeling to assess climate impacts is recognized in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan (CCSP) and was emphasized even more strongly in the National Research Council's review of the CCSP plan. Under this grant, the Iowa State University regional climate research group will coordinate a team of scientists from North America and Europe to collaborate for establishing a baseline for regional climate prediction over the continental U.S. and Canada using regional climate models nested within atmospheric reanalyses (the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)- Department of Energy (DOE) Reanalysis 2 and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis). The objective of this project is to establish a cooperative framework within the regional climate modeling community that advances substantially the responsiveness of U.S. regional climate research to national priorities. The significance of this research is that it will advance the status of regional climate modeling in the US in support of understanding the basic science of regional climate and to provide state-of-the-art information on regional climate for impacts studies. This project constitutes Phase I of the proposed North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). The goals of NARCCAP are to explore the combined uncertainty in climate change scenarios that results from using multiple atmosphere-ocean general circulation models to provide boundary conditions for multiple regional climate models (RCMs), and ultimately to provide regionally resolved data sets suitable for examining the impacts of climate change. A critical first step toward these goals is to establish a baseline of RCM accuracy by evaluating the participating RCMs when driven by reanalysis (loosely, "observed") boundary conditions. The research is a natural extension of the PI's experience in the Project to Intercompare Regional Climate Simulations (PIRCS), which coordinated short-term climate simulations involving up to16 RCMs and presently is coordinating multi-year runs with many of the same models. Broader Impacts: Use of data and information acquired under this project will follow the successful strategy in use under PIRCS, which includes making information accessible from the ISU Regional Climate Modeling Laboratory website (http://rcmlab.agron.iastate.edu/), using data for graduate research dissertations and undergraduate theses, providing data for use in the ISU McNair (minorities) undergraduate program research projects, and partnering with The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research on the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science program.